The introduction of “casting” applications such as Google's Chromecast enabled applications that select content streams and stream receivers now make it possible to select multimedia content hosted on intranets and the internet and to direct the content stream to any display device that hosts a stream receiver or has a stream receiving device, such as Google Chromecast, attached to the display device.
Casting applications facilitate the selection of content by the user being able to use a laptop computer, desktop computer, tablet computer, PDA, or cell phone to select multimedia content on network based service providers such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Pandora, or other such services. Once a user selects a casting application for accessing content, that user can select streaming content and then redirect the content stream by selecting a stream receiver to actually play the content stream. The user presses the play button and the casting application will “cast” the stream to the selected stream receiver.
A typical household environment or a business environment may contain multiple stream receivers and multiple content casting or content stream redirection applications. An environment with both multiple casting/redirect applications and multiple stream receivers can quickly become confusing as to which casting/redirect application will make use of which stream receiver.
Google cast and other streaming schemes force the user to select the stream receiver device in every content casting application separately and each time a stream is to cast on any given content casting application. This can become confusing with which content casting application is streaming to which stream receiver.
As an example, today if one were to launch the Netflix content casting application and cast the stream to a stream receiving device, then launch the YouTube content casting application, one will again have to select the stream receiver device to receive the YouTube content.